Rin Tin Tin

I just wanted to take a minute to let you know that a biography of a dog is number 12 on the New York Times Bestseller List.  It's. A. Dog. How did his sign his life rights contract with a paw print?  I have not read this book, it could very well be Pulitzer material filled with elegantly scripted prose on the human experience written in iambic pentameter.  But, IT'S ABOUT A DOG.  How can there be any internal monologue other than "Is this food?" or "What was that noise?"  How can there be internal monologue, IT'S A DOG! AAHH. 

This is wrong on two levels; why America is finished and how crazy dog owners are.  Enough learned folk have eschewed the infinitely more compelling tales of a human's life to read about a German Shepard that was on TV.  I am going to guess many of these people are Dog People.  Dog People are the ones who hesitate when asked this question: Your home is on fire, you can save a human stranger or your dog, who do you take?  Actually most of them wouldn't hesitate to say "my dog."  I mean some people spend tens of thousands giving dogs cancer treatments!  This is why there is no more dog track in Mass. and why America is finished in general.

From Amazon: "So begins Susan Orlean’s sweeping, powerfully moving account of Rin Tin Tin’s journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon"

Indeed.

-K

Pay Your Fair Share!

The mantra of fiscal liberals recently has been for the rich to "pay their fair share."  After a plethora of soundbites with that same ethos, but with no data to explain what that means or plan to address it, I decided to look at the numbers.  What I found was that we as a country better not hope the rich pay their fair share because then, we are really fucked.  They need to keep paying the completely obscene share they do now.

First, a note on data manipulation.  The link to the IRS data I used can be found here. It is in the first group of data, Table 3.4, tax year 2009.  I combined the income tax and capital gains rows to get a total for each tax bracket.  I eliminated the zero and five percent data from the graphs and calculations because they had a minimal impact.  Everything was under 1%.  It also reflects the rates people pay on their paychecks which seems more intuitive.  The tax brackets on the pie charts are for someone filing Single status on their return. 

Critics of the American capitalist system always decry the income inequality between the rich and the poor, while little is said of the tax inequality.  Granted, it's hard to feel bad for someone who made over $373,650 a year, but what exactly is the "fair share" that group should pay?  The people who qualified for the top marginal tax bracket, a scant .76% of all taxpayers took in 13.3% of all the income, but paid 29.5% of all the taxes.  So, if the omnipresent yet faceless 1% of mythic old white men pay more than double their share of income in taxes, how much is enough?  50%? 75%? F-- it, why should anybody making under $100,000 have to pay taxes?  That wouldn't lead to a horrible bifurcated Entitled versus Financier dichotomy among citizens.  To achieve any kind of fiscal restraint, you need to have an ownership society.  Such a culture can't exist when people have little or no money on the outcome of government's performance.

We can see by the pie chart version of the data that the green slice, $34 to $82 thousand, the middle class, are the only ones paying the definition of their fair share.  Their portion doesn't change size much from the income to tax charts.  The orange slice - evil rich people who use the poor as pawns in their plans for world domination - spreads out quite a bit, while the blue slice - said pawns - nearly disappears.  

Our tax system breaks down to this essentially, the top 2% of taxpayers take in just under 20% of the income and pay just over 40% of the taxes.  If nothing, that seems resoundingly fair to me, probably too fair.  Free market America has quite the socialist tax system. 

Even if you look at effective tax rate which includes all of the deductions, credits, loopholes, advantages of tax attorneys and wealth managers, men with pipes and brandy snifters; the more money you make, the higher taxes you pay.  The only people who get a break are the middle class again (voting works!).  But, my guess is that if I did some more research (I won't), that dip in effective tax rate would be due to the mortgage interest deduction.  When you hit the middle class, you can achieve the American Dream of owning a home.  That is, of course, unless the federal government implicitly guarantees the debt of multiple NGOs that buy increasingly horrible loans, thus incentivizing investment and retail banks into pumping out increasingly dubious mortgages to marginal borrowers, securitizing them, and finally insuring them until everyone with a fake copy of a paycheck has a 5/1 ARM with no points, but can't make even the first payment on the $300,000 house they just bought and the whole thing collapses...but, that's a whole other story.  I mean where is Warren Buffet's secretary?  She was supposed to be paying a higher tax rate than Warren, but if she was, it seems like she was making some substantial donations to the IRS.

Liberals want to claim the rich are ripping off the country with offshore accounts, trust funds, LLC tax avoidance entities, but the numbers don't seem to bear it out for me.  This brief skim of some tax stats is not exhaustive by any means.  I didn't look at multiple-year trends or use any other division of income than tax bracket.  I'm sure some more detailed analysis could possibly invalidate my thesis, but it seems if the rich were getting away with something, it would show up in this cursory view of income and taxes.  It's hard to feel sorry for people that make a sizable income, but hey professional athletes get sympathy when framed in context.  Why can't we just say that the rich, the very rich actually, pay an inordinate amount of their share of taxes.  A percent more than acceptable to be considered reasonable.  This is not a soundbite after all, this from the IRS's website.  These are hard numbers.  So, the next time someone says the rich should "pay their fair share" point them to Table 3.4, tax year 2009 of the IRS Statistics of Income and ask them what that means exactly.


-K